Ep. 420: FIRE!

One of the most dangerous things that can happen inside a spacecraft is fire. Seriously, it’s NASA’s worst nightmare, and for good reason. Fire acts differently in space, and astronauts are always on alert. Here’s why.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and the director of CosmoQuest.

Hey, Pamela. How are you doin’?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I’m doin’ well. How are you doing, Fraser?

Fraser Cain: Great.

Welcome to Season 11 of Astronomy Cast.

Now, we had an episode that you brought back from Dragoncon last week. But this is our first live show back together again here, on the interwebs. So, it’s good to see you again. Although we saw each other in person, like, a week ago.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So we did our normal thing – never see each other in real life while recording – but we got to hang out down at Kennedy Space Flight Center last week and watch the magnificent OSIRIS-REx launch off on her mission to pick up a rock and bring it back.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, it was fantastic.

And then we’ve got lots of exciting things planned this season but we’ve got sort of one big event that we want to let you know about now, so that you can prepare for the next year as you get yourself organized here.

August 21st, 2017, there will be a total eclipse of the sun that is going to pass through the United States, from the western United States (Oregon) down to Nashville. And you, Pamela, happen to live very close to the eclipse path, within a few dozen kilometers. And so, we are collecting together. We are making our way to your house next summer to watch the eclipse and we want you to join us.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Now, not everyone fits in my house. It’s a nice house; it’s a pretty large house but it’s not big enough for all of you.

But over in Saint Louis, there’s this amazing hotel called the Moonrise Hotel. It’s decorated entirely with Apollo mission stuff and things in space and it’s amazing. And we are going to spend a couple of days at the Moonrise Hotel talking science, talking astronomy, learning how to take photos when the eclipse is in the process of getting ready to happen, actually watch the eclipse – do not take a photo while watching the eclipse, just watch it. But you can program your cam – anyways –

We are planning a great activity. Out of the city of Saint Louis, we are going to be renting busses to ideally go to join everyone from NASA at Southern Illinois University Carbondale on the day of the event. But, if their weather’s bad, we’re going to have a bus. So, we’ll go where the weather’s best. We’ll drive up to Mizzou if we need to. We’ll stay in the Saint Louis area.

And so, we have a registration cost tied to this that covers the bus, covers the room rentals, covers snacks and pretty much breaks even, if we get the minimum number of people required per bus. And whatever’s left over is going to go to supporting Astronomy Cast far into the future.

So go take a look, sign up. If you don’t want to stay in the Moonrise Hotel, that is completely okay. Stay at a campground, stay at a lower-priced hotel – it’s like a hundred-something a night anyways for the hotel, so it’s fairly cheap. And we’ve done everything we possibly could to make this an affordable trip for anyone who wants to join us. And I’m really hoping you’ll come out.

And we’re probably going to do some extra things the days beforehand, if we find out that people are coming out early. So, like, if you want to come out early and go on a massive bike riding tour of the area with me, I am happy to do that. But we want this to be fun.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: This is a gathering of our Astronomy Cast family to watch a solar eclipse.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So we will probably do some live – you know, we’ll probably do, like, a couple of impromptu episodes of Astronomy Cast that we’ll save into this. You can watch us do the show but in the same room. We will – you know, we’re probably going to have some special guests and friends there, who we will try and do some other interesting, entertaining events while you’re there. We’ll probably have telescopes kickin’ around and we’re just gonna hang with you for the couple of days leading up to and after the eclipse.

And hopefully, you know, we’ll be in a great adventure and we’ll all do it together and it’s not that expensive and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.

So, how do people find out more about this, Pamela?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Go to astronomycast.com and there is, on the main navigation menu, a drop-down that says “Trips”. This is currently our only trip that could change but, currently, this is our only trip. Or just go to astronomycast.com/astronomy-cast-solar-eclipse-escape-2017. I don’t expect you to remember it, really.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Just go to astronomycast.com –

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Click on the “Trips” –

Fraser Cain: Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And there ya go. Help us explore greater Saint Louis and watch an amazing solar eclipse traversing across these United States.

Fraser Cain: Fantastic.

And I think we’re gonna – These are going to be gone pretty quick. So I think, you know, if this runs out then we’ll try and find some other places –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. We currently –

Fraser Cain: And try to expand –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. We’re currently capped at 100 people because that’s all that fits in the room –

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And that’s exactly two busses of human beings. But if that – if all 100 slots are gone and I have enough time to find space at another local facility, I will gladly do that. So –

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Feel free to add work to my life by –

Fraser Cain: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: – coming out and joining us.

Fraser Cain: Alright.

Okay. So let’s get on to the show. I know this is a super-long intro but it’s worth it. I think it’s going to be really exciting and we’ll keep – we’ll keep reminding you.

Alright. So, one of the most dangerous things that can happen inside a spacecraft is fire. Seriously, it’s NASA’s worst nightmare and for good reason. Fire acts differently in space and astronauts are always on alert. Here’s why.

Before we go into this, I think we should talk about how the suggestion for this week’s episode came about. So, can you – can you tell the story?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So – So we were having various things and stuff happening with Cosmoquest, basically. I was running budgets. I hate running budgets. Budgets are my worst nightmare. I can do them; I can do them really well. I’d rather not do them.

Anyways – So I am in the middle of trying to sort out receipts and budgets and finding things. And Susie pings me and she’s like, “What topic should we do for Astronomy Cast?” And I wrote back, “Putting out fires”, referring to the invoices I was looking for. And she was like, “Great! Fires on Earth or fires in space?” And I was like, “That’s not what I meant but we’ll go with that: Fires in space.” So –

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: – my –

Fraser Cain: And I – And I heard it too and then I just thought that was – that was brilliant; a great, great, great title. So, let’s – So I said, “Let’s do it. Let’s go with it. I’m on board.”

And – Because it is, actually, a super-fascinating thing and there’s been some recent development –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: – in this exact place where NASA’s been testing out fire in space.

So let’s go back around. So – So, before we talk about fire in space, let’s just understand what fire is first. It’s time to bring out some kind of triangle. How – What is fire?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, fire is basically a chemical process by which a fuel gets – it goes through an exothermic process in the presence of oxidizer that changes the molecular structure of that fuel. Often, the heat released in this exothermic reaction makes things go “kablooey”.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: “Kablooey” is the official term. I’m gonna go with that today.

Fraser Cain: Right.

And in order to have fire, right, you need to have an oxidizer. You need to have a fuel source. You need to have heat. That is the –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, the heat kinda gets produced in the process.

Fraser Cain: But that is the triangle, right?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes, yes.

Fraser Cain: So you need those three things and then you get fire.

But how does fire work in space? I mean, it still works, right? Inside – Now, not out in the cold vacuum of space but –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Oh, it can totally happen in the cold vacuum of space if you mix things in a –

Fraser Cain: Right. If you provide it an oxidizer and you provide it –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Fuel.

Fraser Cain: Right, fuel.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So you can have situations where you have your fuel, your oxygen; you mix them together. They undergo this chemical reaction. As part of the chemical reaction, the gases involved radically expand and it’s that expanding gas coming out the nozzle of either a rocket engine, a thruster, a navigation engine – any of these little things that you’ve seen in sci-fi and in reality that cause spacecraft to move, reorient; all those different things. That is generally a reaction involving, again, fuel and oxidizer mixing, chemical reaction gives off heat , heat has expanding gas, expanding gas pushes.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. And one of the things that, like, I had never really thought about until I read about NASA’s recent experiments is, here on Earth, when you have your handy dandy little candle if you’re a girl like me – people give these things to you as gifts on a regular basis. And you light up the candle and the candle goes up and then the smoke goes up and you end up with dirty ceilings so you have figure out how to wash, eventually.

This whole things-going-up process is because warm air is more buoyant. It is less dense. It floats in the more dense air around it. And that whole buoyancy is in response to gravity. You remove the gravity, you remove the buoyancy. So you have a burning flame in space, nothing’s rising. Instead, you simply have the warmth gathering in a glowing sphere around the thing that’s burning.

So, light that exact same Yankee candle on the space station – this is not what they use on the space station – but, if they did, you’d have a perfect sphere of flame around the wick. It would glow a slightly different color because it’s this condensed circle. It’s actually burning at a lower temperature. And, here on Earth, your heated air goes up, causing the cooler air to come in; you have circulation going on. In space, you just have diffusion. So, oxygen molecules are doing their normal happy little bounce around, flow in through their normal motions thing. And that totally changes how things burn.

And this is a video of a recent fire experiment that took place on the International Space Station – not on the Station – they had it, like, exterior to where the astronauts are –

I haven’t seen it this big. I watched it on a phone. So if I, like, suddenly go silent, it’s because, wow –

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: – that looks a whole lot more dramatic when watched on a 27 inch Cinema monitor.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Part of the, sort of, new improvements we’ve made to the way we broadcast Astronomy Cast is we actually view this live video and we’ve got a really cool broadcasting system and we’re displaying video to the audience. And it is entrancing Pamela and distracting her.

So, remember, we have audio listeners, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes, sorry audio listeners.

So they’re – Dealing with flames in space is something that NASA has to figure out how to do. So far, we’ve been extraordinarily lucky with the ISS, with the space shuttle before that, with the Gemini missions before that and with everyone who made it into low Earth orbit and to the moon, in the past.

Part of the reason that we’ve been lucky is because we only use high-oxygen environments in space suits. The other part of it is, so far, there hasn’t been an electrical fire and that’s just – wow, thank you, thank you universe.

But, at some point, our luck’s going to run out. So it’s super-important to understand: How does fire go in space? So that when and if this kind of mistake happens, something goes wrong – and it could be something as stupid as micrometeorite takes out the wrong thing – we know how things are going to burn.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And we’ve had sort of one really horrible experience with – with fire in an enclosed space with the Apollo 1 disaster –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: – that happened. Now, it wasn’t in the zero gravity of weightlessness but it showed you what happens when you’ve got fire in an enclosed space. In this case, this was the Apollo 1 astronauts. They had put 100 percent oxygen in the capsule and, like, electricity sparks from the Velcro –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: – caught on fire. It was awful.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So, the human body requires oxygen. We don’t require all the other randomness that’s in the atmosphere around us. We don’t require all that nitrogen. Heck, too much carbon monoxide makes us sick.

In putting together the early NASA missions, it’s just easier to only have to carry the oxygen. You don’t have to worry about the partial pressures. You don’t – You can actually have it at a much lower atmospheric pressure and get everything you need into your blood stream. But fire burns much more effectively when it has added oxidizer and that “oxi” in the word “oxidizer” is oxygen.

So, in the extremely oxygen-rich Apollo 1 atmosphere, they – they couldn’t put out the fire that was triggered, quite by accident. They couldn’t get out fast enough. And people died. And we try not to do that. That’s an understatement.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Death – Death is bad.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And so, in going back to the drawing board, figuring out what the problem was and daring to do the difficult things, they reengineered the atmosphere for all future space missions.

And so now, we have people breathing a oxygen-nitrogen mix. There’s, of course, going to be carbon dioxide we exhale. And it’s very similar to what we have here on Earth. And so we don’t have this flash fire problem that was a concern on Apollo 1.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

So then, let’s say that a fire does get started. You were talking about, like, a – you know, a micrometeorite happening. Some kind of event that actually gets the fire going on in, you know – in an enclosed space. What do they do? What do the – What can they do to kind of prevent or deal with a fire in space?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So – So, just to be utterly clear, the risk of fire on the International Space Station is extremely low because of all the effort that goes into protecting everybody. We’re talking about an extreme what-if that is scientifically super-cool and bad for human beings.

So, if you do have a fire in space, first of all, you don’t have the fire-rising problem that you have on Earth but this also means you don’t have the smoke-rising thing that you have here on Earth. So, as all of us hopefully learned as small children, in case of fire, get down on your belly, creep forward while breathing as close to the ground as you can because that’s where the good oxygen is, feel the doorknob, call for help; do all your safety measures.

If you’re on the International Space Station and a fire sets out, what you’re going to have is things defusing and the only motion of that smoke and that fire is going to be the fire moving along whatever is burning and also responding to the space station’s, spaceship’s – whatever space thing you’re on – responding to the ventilation system.

There is constantly moving air on the International Space Station, so you don’t end up with your head in a pocket of carbon dioxide and die. Again, death bad. So you do have this steady ventilation – this constant movement of air – that keeps things circulating, keeps the oxygen coming in, keeps the carbon dioxide moving away.

In case of fire, you’re going to have the fire moving along that ventilation system. Bad! Because the ventilation system is meant to move things effectively. You’re also going to have whatever is on fire, can burn at a much lower temperature than here on Earth.

We’re all familiar with the book, Fahrenheit 451. 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper spontaneously will combust in a normal atmosphere. It doesn’t need to be that hot on the International Space Station. That’s a bad thing. Things burn at lower temperatures.

So, your No. 1 priority is going to be: Remove the oxidizer from where the fire is. Remove the fuel source. Anyone who’s watched good sci-fi knows one of the favorite things to do on a spacecraft in a science fiction movie is you flush the atmosphere and the fire goes out. It’s beautiful.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: With the International Space Station, that would probably be bad. Thinking in terms of “in general”, you want to prevent the fire, stop it by sealing it off, removing its ability to get additional oxygen. So that idea that you have with a stove fire – if you put the pan on the pot, it puts itself out – totally applies in space. So, as long as you can have the fire confined – ideally floating in the middle of the room with no fuel to jump towards –

Fraser Cain: Right, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I can imagine floating over to it, frantically, and closing it inside of something airtight. That’s the best of all possible cases.

But the next case is you shut off the ventilation, get yourself somewhere different and let fire extinguishers take care of it.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, yeah. So that’s the issue is – is how, you know, flushing the atmosphere. You know – we’re using the atmosphere too, right?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: So, you know, it’s really rough to be able to use the – yeah, you know – to go and, like, hit the vacuum, flush all the atmosphere of your spacecraft – you know, when you’re using it. It’s not as simple as they make it in science fiction.

I guess, you know, it’s not like they have these emergency doors that they can just – psshhh – you know. And the whole atmosphere goes out and you lose all your stuff. So it’s a – it’s a pretty sketchy solution to it.

Well, you can use chemical fire retardants. You can essentially cover them in something, preferably adhesive, so that you aren’t doing horrible things to the atmosphere of your ISS, which has already gotten horrible.

So, you can use all sorts of fire retardants. You can use fire-retardant blankets. The whole “smother the fire”, that’s totally an awesome idea in outer space.

Fraser Cain: Right. But I just – You know, here on Earth, right – like, throw a blanket over it. You’ve got gravity working to help hold your blanket down to put out the fire; to smother it, right? But there, you’ve, like – I just can’t –

Dr. Pamela Gay: You have human beings who have to sort of – I mean, literally, best case is: I have a cup o’ fire floating in – I probably shouldn’t do this with my NASA cup. I have a cup o’ fire floating in the middle of the room, –

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: – splashing fire all over the room and I either spray it with something that will adhere to it or take fire-retardant blankets and make a sandwich o’ fire.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, yeah. I just think of the aerial ballet required for astronauts to grab a blanket, to meet in the middle where the fire is happening, and to make this fire sandwich. It’s like it’s – it’s bad. So, you know, let’s focus on the fire retardant system. Let’s focus on smothering it with carbon dioxide or some kind of chemical thing.

But again – once again, right? Like, on Earth, you’ve got gravity to help keep your method of extinguishing the fire, together with your fire. Right? You spray your water and gravity takes your water down onto the thing that’s on fire. You spray your fire extinguisher and the gravity is helping with this.

But in space, you spray your water or you spray your chemical blast and it could miss the fire. And then bounce off the back wall of the spacecraft and bounce around and – like, this is bad.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, it is.

Now, one amusing thing that – water, space – bad. Electronics, you don’t want to destroy them. So, different parts of the International Space Station are run by different countries. There’s a Japanese module, there’s a Russian module, there’s American modules. The Russian module actually does have a water-based foam fire extinguisher. Again, foam – it adheres to things. The other modules have carbon dioxide units, so similar to what you might have in your kitchen but designed slightly different.

Jet propulsion system – I love the fact that your poor astronaut, who’s trying to put out this fire, is essentially bracing themselves to counterbalance the jet propulsion unit in their hand that they’re trying to use to put out the fire –

Fraser Cain: That’s right. Your fire extinguisher is a propulsion system, right, which is just hilarious. So you’re, you know, –

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, as what’s on fire – if it’s there, like, — if you have your fire floating in the middle of the room, it’s going to, like, get jet propulsioned by the fire retardant. This is bad.

Fraser Cain: This is bad. I mean – I mean, I think, you know, NASA makes sure that every single little thing is – is not flammable.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.

Fraser Cain: Right? Like, every – from the casing of every wire, from everybody’s clothing, from everything. And we saw that in The Martian, right?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Oh, yeah.

Fraser Cain: You remember –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Nothing burns.

Fraser Cain: – in The Martian – yeah. There was this whole part where Matt Damon is saying, like, NASA is really afraid of fire –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Oh, yeah – for a reason.

Fraser Cain: And so nothing – yeah, for good reason. Yeah. And so nothing burns. And the only thing he could find that he could burn was the cut-up pieces of a little wooden cross. That was the only thing that he could get his hands on throughout the entire spacecraft that would burn. And that is the level – so – of how serious NASA takes this.

Now, did you see the movie Gravity?

Dr. Pamela Gay: No, no.

Fraser Cain: No?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I was warned by people like you that it had bad physics in it and I would be shouty.

Fraser Cain: Ohh, so shouty.

But – right. So there was a scene in that, right, where the fire was, like, moving along. And it moved in a really different way than – than we’d see here on Earth. And I think it’s the way you described it, right? That it sort of crawls along whatever flammable surfaces it can reach; it, you know, puts out its smoke in a sort of right – in a circular – yeah, that’s right – in a sort of a spreading way, which is sort of a different world. So –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Don’t stick your head in the blob of smoke.

Fraser Cain: Right, right. It’s gonna be hot and smoky in there.

Dr. Pamela Gay: But think about how different this makes your thinking on where to put fire extinguishers – not fire extinguishers, fire detectors – because, here on Earth, at least on my house, which is on Earth, we have fire detectors in, like, every other room of the house. It’s an old house. It’s been fire twice. We don’t want this to happen a third time.

Fraser Cain: Your house has been on fire twice?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.

Fraser Cain: Oh, wow. Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It was built in 1893. These things happen.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And so, all of these smoke detectors are, like, three inches from the ceiling. And, this is because smoke rises; the smoke interrupts an electric field inside the detector causing a change in voltage, which, in turn, causes a noise that scares everybody in the house, especially the dog.

That doesn’t work in space because your smoke is expanding in a sphere from whatever was on fire, if your ventilation is turned off, and if your ventilation isn’t turned off, your smoke is expanding in the direction that the ventilation pushes the smoke. So you have to think about putting all your smoke detectors, basically, following the air flow and near whatever might possibly – like, electrical fire or something.

So, even just thinking about where to put fire detectors becomes radically different when you’re in a zero-G environment.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Uhh. What a total nightmare.

So now, we talked about his briefly – the experiment that NASA did, which was to light a fire in space. Like, the – what is this –

Dr. Pamela Gay: As you do, as you do.

Fraser Cain: Rule No. 1 – right? Right? Like, don’t take off your space helmet and don’t light a fire. Like, those are just two rules.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: And yet, they broke Rule No. 2, which was – they lit a fire.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. It was – and the videos of this are amazing. We will embed one in our show notes.

The experiment was called “Saffire” because – why not?

Fraser Cain: Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I –

Fraser Cain: It’s got “fire” in it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Amusingly, the flames are extremely blue and circular so they do kind of look like a color of a sapphire gemstone. And it’s just this amazing sphere when they do the small experiment but with the big experiment, they have a heating element that combusts the fuel, which has oxidizer, and the flames just move along the fuel and eat everything up. It’s this beautiful – It looks like, if you’ve ever started a chemical reaction – for instance, adding red dye to something and seen it spread out through water – it’s that same sort of just continual smooth movement across the fuel.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s stunningly beautiful.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And the people who watch us live will get a chance to see this. While the people who are listening on audio – I can make some sound effects maybe. Bwuhhh.

Yeah, really cool and really, like, just reckless – not reckless. I mean, the trick is they’ve got to know how this works.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, they have to.

Fraser Cain: And so they – They do the experiment, see what happens and then – And then, you know – and then, they can see what learn – what happened and then use a way to prevent it. So they can try and predict and prevent the fire in the future. So – fire bad.

Okay. Well, I think we’re sort of out of time but Pamela – thank you for –

Dr. Pamela Gay: My pleasure. And –

Fraser Cain: – for bringing the brain and –

Dr. Pamela Gay: Any of you who are willing to take your love of listening to our show and help us make this show better, one of the things we’re also going to put out on our website is a link to a survey about podcasting. We’re currently doing a funded research study that is approved for publication through our university’s internal review board for people who just want to make sure we dotted our I’s and crossed our T’s, rather than dotting our T’s and crossing our I’s.

We have a link to the survey. It’s going to be on astronomycast.com. Check it out, fill out the survey – It will help us understand how to improve podcasting and, since we’re publishing the results, it won’t just help us here at Astronomy Cast, it’s going to be used to help everyone out there doing podcasts.

So please, take a moment. Go to astronomycast.com, click on the link for the survey, take a few minutes and help us just do better making you enjoy – or helping you enjoy – content like this show.

Fraser Cain: Forcing you to enjoy –

Dr. Pamela Gay: We can’t force them to enjoy.

Fraser Cain: – podcasts. Yeah. Alright.

Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: My pleasure, Fraser.

Female Speaker: Thank you for listening to Astronomy Cast, a non-profit resource provided by Astrosphere New Media Association, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can find show notes and transcripts for every episode at astronomycast.com. You can email us at info@astronomycast.com. Tweet us @astronomycast. Like us on Facebook or circle us on Google Plus.

We record our show live on YouTube every Friday at 1:30 p.m. Pacific, 4:30 p.m. Eastern or 2030 GMT. If you missed the live event, you can always catch up over on cosmoquest.org or on our YouTube page. Our music is provided by Travis Serl, and the show was edited by Susie Murph.